The New Pop Star Goddesses
Female pop stars are funnier, angrier, queerer, weirder, smarter—and more powerful—than ever.
Sabrina Carpenter and Taylor Swift recently set their fans aflutter with a duet mashup of their songs “Espresso” and “Is It Over Now?” onstage during Swift’s Eras tour. Besides their shocking height difference, what was remarkable about this appearance was the sense that Swift was anointing Carpenter, who’s about a decade her junior, as part of the next generation of powerful Pop Star Goddesses. Where once Madonna kissed Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears during an MTV Video Music Awards performance meant to shock, Swift is now calmly saying to Carpenter, while playing acoustic guitar onstage at the biggest pop tour in recent memory, one built on her own lifetime of work: “Your lyrics are worth singing here, too.”
In fact, in a particularly charming moment, Swift even asks, before doing her verse, “Can I do it?”, explicitly asking for Carpenter’s consent before paying homage.
Pop Star Goddesses are currently more ascendant than ever. Just take a look at the Grammy nominations, where old-school goddesses (Taylor, Beyoncé, and Lady Gaga) and new (Charli XCX, Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan, and Carpenter) absolutely dominate. Meanwhile, Swift and Beyoncé are world powers who endorse presidents in official and business-like ways, even as newspapers step back from the same responsibility.
This all shows how female power has become largely concentrated in the pop star realm over the last 20 years. Feminism and pop stardom have become nearly synonymous since the 2000s, as feminist anthems have proliferated and our two biggest stars, Taylor and Beyoncé, embraced both the term “feminism” and its ethos, and have also become more politically outspoken over the course of their careers. They shape society’s views of feminism and its vision of femaleness. Male pop stars don’t have nearly the same level of responsibility; the closest male equivalent may be rap stars, who are often regarded as male role models but are not required to be good ones.
Female pop stars have evolved even further since my book Pop Star Goddesses came out a mere four years ago. Not every pop star rises to the level of a PSG, who represents something bigger than a hit song.1 But several new stars warrant this status: Eilish, Roan, Charli XCX, Megan Thee Stallion, Olivia Rodrigo, and Carpenter among them. What’s remarkable is the ways that they have taken what Swift, Beyoncé, and Lady Gaga have done, in particular, into thrilling new directions. Here, a few major themes I’ve noticed in the new class:
They do not cater to the male gaze nearly as much as pop stars were expected to in the Britney heyday.
The 2000s were brutal for young, famous women, who were chased constantly by paparazzi, hounded by gossip magazines, and sexualized in grotesque ways, like involuntary upskirt photos and media pontificating about their breasts. These new stars were born into that world, but they’re not playing that game now. Eilish’s entire brand is authenticity. At 22, she’s now an old-schooler among this crew, but she’s always been an old soul, remarkably grounded since she was a teen pop star. She was the first real Gen Z PSG, forging her own path in baggy clothes, not the least bit worried about seeming “sexy” to men, and writing songs in her bedroom about being weird. (More on the “weird” thing in a bit.)
Roan (whom I’ve written about extensively before) is a unique phenomenon, a PSG as soon as she hit the mainstream this year with a fresh, bombastic take on ‘80s-inspired pop, drag queen-inspired looks, and witty, sometimes-a-little-dirty lyrics about loving women. She often wears skimpy outfits, but they’re not for the guys—they’re for the girls, which feels somehow more transgressive than anything Madonna ever did.
They have gotten more lyric-focused, more rageful, and more confessional. (Thanks, Lemonade!)
While Rodrigo broke through with the very teenage ballad “Driver’s License,” she soon emerged as a songwriting force who has helped to revive the emo-pop-rock of the 2000s, which matches her lyrics full of big feelings perfectly. At just 21, the former Disney kid has two hit albums and has been named Time’s Entertainer of the Year, Billboard’s Woman of the Year, and ASCAP’s Songwriter of the Year (twice). Her confessional songwriting and large, young, female fanbase makes her perhaps the closest heir to Taylor Swift, though her sound is more influenced by the rock she listened to growing up: her parents’ favorites included Pearl Jam, the White Stripes, Green Day, and No Doubt. As Alanis Morissette proved before her, there’s something powerful about giving girls an outlet for singing and screaming their feelings out together. I’m personally partial to her pissed-off “Good 4 U” (“I guess that therapist I found for you, she really helped/Now you can be a better man for your brand-new girl”) and the very in-your-20s “Bad Idea Right?” (“Yes, I know that he's my ex, but can't two people reconnect?/I only see him as a friend, I just tripped and fell into his bed”). Speaking of which …
Corollary: They are funny.
The fact that Eilish’s breakthrough hit “Bad Guy” includes the line about her being a “might-seduce-your-dad type” will never leave me. Megan Thee Stallion burst onto the scene with an audacious run of hits: First, in 2019, there was the single “Hot Girl Summer,” which immediately caught on not just as a song, but as a flippant concept. (“Brat Summer” is but one of its descendants.) Just one year later came the undeniable “Savage Remix,” featuring no less than Beyoncé, and “WAP,” her hilariously filthy collaboration with Cardi B.
Carpenter’s easy-breezy “Espresso,” meanwhile, was inescapable this year, even inspiring one of Saturday Night Live’s best sketches of the season. That connection with sketch comedy is oddly appropriate: “Espresso” is among several of her songs that are great partly because they are funny. “I can't relate to desperation/My give-a-fucks are on vacation,” she croons sweetly in that hit. In her other hit, “Please Please Please,” she sings, “Heartbreak is one thing, my ego's another/I beg you, don't embarrass me, motherfucker.” (She also loves a good swear word.) Some of the credit goes to her cowriter, Amy Allen, but Carpenter gets points for the choice, the delivery—and, it should be said, elevating one of the few female songwriter/producers working in the upper echelons of pop. (I love plenty of Swift’s collaborations with Jack Antonoff and adore Dan Nigro’s work with Rodrigo and Roan, but it’s striking how much of our female pop is still produced by men.) And something about Carpenter’s doll-like beauty makes it all the funnier.
Charli XCX actually hosted Saturday Night Live, and Roan, too, is all but a standup comedian: Please see the entire spoken bridge of “Red Wine Supernova” (re: her California King, or maybe it’s a twin bed …) or the entire concept of her new country-tinged song “The Giver,” not to mention her staging of it on … yes, SNL.
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They’re queer.
Most of Roan’s oeuvre is dedicated to openly loving women, and—to “The Giver”’s point—women’s superior ability to sexually please other women. Eilish has joined her among the very-out goddesses, too. She has a unique quality among pop stars of all generations—she always just seems like a regular, distinct human being who happens to write popular music, which allows her to grow with her work. On her recent album, she’s transparently gay in her lyrics (“I could eat that girl for lunch”), and has come out in the public spotlight. All the while, she’s remained an authentic songwriting voice, even as she evolves with age, which helps to normalize it all.
They’re weirder and artsier than any of their predecessors, and they’re damn smart.
Eilish broke through with a homemade sound unlike anything we’d heard before, and continues to be the witchy girl behind the bleachers that we all kind-of wish we could be. Roan is fully dedicated to her performance-art ethos, and often calls Chappell Roan (her stage name) a “project,” an idea that Lady Gaga pioneered. This has allowed Roan to bring genuine joy, fun, kitsch, and catchiness back to pop music at full blast—it’s nothing but a crazy act, after all!—while declining to reveal much about her personal life.
Charli XCX became national news this year when her album Brat became a meme that coincided with Kamala Harris’ candidacy for president, culminating with Charli herself declaring that “kamala IS brat” online. While clueless cable news anchors grappled with what “brat” meant, her very weird album achieved mainstream breakthrough. But Charli has been making an art project of pop stardom for years now, and she’s very good at it. She can write catchy, or glitchy, or clubby, or bombastic. She’s also very self-aware and intentional, and good at talking about her music, almost as if it’s a science fair project.
They’re all smart, or they wouldn’t have achieved what they have. But one impressive case-in-point is Megan Thee Stallion, who, in 2021, the same year she became the first woman to win the Best Rap Performance Grammy for “Savage Remix,” also went back to school and finished her bachelor’s degree in health administration from Texas Southern University. She’s sensible, and also socially conscious: She used a Saturday Night Live performance of “Savage Remix” to protest Breonna Taylor’s killing by police and wrote a stunning op-ed for The New York Times about violence against Black women. Proof that being a Pop Star Goddess is far from meaningless in the 2020s. We’ll need them more than ever in the years to come.
For example, Adele shows us the wisdom that can come from heartbreak; Britney represents resilience and Christina self-preservation; Lady Gaga is a social justice warrior, while Swift shows us how to stand up for our own worth.
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